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By Root 2017 0

he has taken notes on the tanneries of Queimadas, where he has idled away a few hours in these last eight days, and leafs through what he has written: “Brick buildings, roofs of round tiles, roughhewn columns. Scattered about everywhere, bundles of angico bark, scored through with the aid of a hammer and a knife. They toss the angico into tanks full of river water. After removing the hair from the hides they submerge them in the tanks and leave them to soak for eight days or so, the time required to tan them. The bark of the tree called angico gives off tannin, the substance that tans them. They then hang the hides in the shade till they dry, and scrape them with a knife to remove any residue left on them. They treat in this way the hides of cattle, sheep, goats, rabbits, deer, foxes, and jaguars. Angico is blood-red, with a strong odor. The tanneries are primitive family enterprises in which the father, the mother, the sons, and dose relatives work. Rawhide is the principal wealth of Queimadas.” He puts the little notebook back in the valise. The tanners were friendly, explained to him how they went about their work. Why is it that they are so reluctant to talk about Canudos? Do they mistrust someone whose Portuguese they find it difficult to understand? He knows that Canudos and the Counselor are the main topic of conversation in Queimadas. Despite all his efforts, however, he has not been able to discuss the subject with anyone, not even Rufino and Jurema. In the tanneries, in the railway station, in the Our Lady of Grace boarding house, in the public square of Queimadas, the moment he has brought the subject up he has seen the same wary look in everyone’s eyes, the same silence has fallen, or the same evasive answers been offered. “They’re on their guard. They’re mistrustful,” he thinks. He thinks: “They know what they’re doing. They’re canny.”

He digs about among his clothes and the revolver once again and takes out the only book in the little valise. It is an old, dog-eared copy, whose vellum binding has turned dark, so that the name of Pierre Joseph Proudhon is scarcely legible now, but whose title, Système des contradictions, is still clear, as is the name of the city where it was printed: Lyons. Distracted by the hubbub of the fiesta and above all by his treacherous impatience, he does not manage to concentrate his mind for long on his reading. Clenching his teeth, he then forces himself to reflect on objective things. A man who is not interested in general problems or ideas lives cloistered in Particularity, which can be recognized by the curvature of two protruding, almost sharp-pointed little bones behind his ears. Did he feel them on Rufino’s head? Does Imaginativeness, perhaps, manifest itself in the strange sense of honor, in what might be called the ethical imagination, of the man who is about to take him to Canudos?

His first memories, which were to become the best ones and the ones that came back most readily as well, were neither of his mother, who abandoned him to run after a sergeant in the National Guard who passed through Custódia at the head of a flying brigade that was chasing cangaceiros, nor of his father, whom he never knew, nor of the aunt and uncle who took him in and brought him up—Zé Faustino and Dona Angela—nor of the thirty-some huts and sun-baked streets of Custódia, but of the wandering minstrels. They came to town every so often, to enliven wedding parties, or heading for the roundup-time fiesta at a hacienda or the festival with which a town celebrated its patron saint’s day, and for a few slugs of cane brandy and a plate of jerky and farofa—manioc flour toasted in olive oil—they told the stories of Olivier, of the Princess Maguelone, of Charlemagne and the Twelve Peers of France. João listened to them open-eyed, his lips moving with the cantadores’. Afterward he had splendid dreams resounding with the clashing of lances of the knights doing battle to save Christianity from the pagan hordes.

But the story that came to be the flesh of his flesh was that of Robert the Devil, the son